Trying to find useful things to do with emerging technologies in open education and data journalism

Fragment – Diagramming the Structure of a Python dict Using BlockDiag, & Some Quick Reflections on Computing Education

As a throwaway diagram in a piece of teaching material I wanted to visualise the structure of a Python dict. One tool I use for generating simple block diagrams is BlockDiag. This uses a simple notation for generating box and arrow diagrams:

So how can we get the key structure from a nested Python dict in that form? There may well be a Python method somewhere for grabbing this information, but it was just a quick coffee break puzzle to write a thing to grab that data and represent it as required:

There are probably better ways of doing it*, but that’s not necessarily the point. Which is a point I realised chatting to a colleague earlier today: I’m not that interested in the teaching of formal computing approaches as a way of training enterprise developers. Nor am I interested in the teaching of computing through contrived toy examples. What I’m far more interested in is helping students do without us; and students, at that, who have end-user computing needs that they want to be able to satisfy in whatever domain they end up in.

Which is to say, not (in the first instance) enterprise level, production quality code. It’s code to get stuff done. End-user application development code. Personal, disposable/throwaway, ad hoc productivity tool development. Scruffy code that lets you use bits of string and gaffer tape and chunks of other people’s code to solve a particular problem.

But that’s not to say the code has to stay ropey… In testing the first attempt at the above code, it lacked the guards that checked whether a variable was a dict, at which point it failed whenever a literal value was encountered. There may well be other things that are broken about it but I can fix those as they crop up (because I know the sort of output I expect to see*, and if I don’t get it, I can try to fix it.) I also had to go and look up how to include literal curly brackets in a python formatted string (double them up) for the print statement. But that’s okay. That’s just syntax… Knowing that I should be able to print the literal brackets was the important thing… And that’s all part of what I think a lot of our curriculum lacks – enthusing folk, making them curious, getting them to have expectations about what is and isn’t and should be possible**, and then being able to act on that.

* informal test driven end user software application development…?!;-)
** with some personal ethics about what may be possible but shouldn’t be pursued and should be lobbied against…